10 Things they don’t tell Music Producers… til it’s too late.

10 Things they don’t tell Music Producers…. til it’s too late

If you are new to music production, or even if you’ve been poking around for a while, there are a number of things that you haven’t been told about making music. Depending on what angle you are taking to get into the music production game, you are likely either over preparing or under preparing for what lies ahead.

Sadly, many suffer from what they consider to be complete failure & thus give up. It is my belief that if they had this information ahead of time, they probably would have had the power to move through the rough spots. The following are 10 things I certainly wish I had known when I started (or even after 10 years in!)

1. Your first attempts at making music won’t be great, and that’s the way it should be.

One of the biggest mistakes an aspiring producer can make is to think their next song is going to be the song that not only changes their lives but changes music history. Unfortunately, these are the high expectations and pressure they put on themselves & this is the reason they never finish anything. Nothing you make the first time around can compete with the producer’s who have churned out 100’s or even thousands of songs.

If you sit there for a year or more struggling with making your first song the hit of the century, you are missing the opportunity that creating many imperfect songs can bring you. The truth is that you need to finish a good 10-20 songs before you start to find your groove. This might seem daunting for perfectionist, but if you can put aside perfection and just call a project done when you’ve reached the tip of your current skill level, you’ll find yourself improving at a dramatically faster rate. Plus, as your production & listening skills get better, you can always go back and revisit old songs for improvements that now seem obvious to you.

2. Nobody creates in a constant peak state

Peak states of consciousness, also called flow is considered to be the most desired state of being a human can experience. Extreme athletes & adventurists don’t risk their lives because they are crazy. It’s because being on the edge is the only way to create these flow states. Nobody can experience these states constantly.

And when I say nobody, I mean it. The reason for this is that peak states of creativity follow a pattern which involves lulls & frustration. It’s 2 sides of the same coin & you simply can’t have one without the other. If you aren’t putting yourself at the edge of your capabilities and risking failure, your level of focus simply won’t be intense enough to put you into this peak state of mind.

If you are a multi-tasker or tend to surround yourself with distractions, you will have no chance of reaching this state. Peak creativity states make the whole world fade away and you experience “now” in a way that can’t really be explained unless you have been there.

Great artists have taught themselves how to get into this state more often than others, but still understand that 90% of the time, all artists have to push themselves to do the work regardless of how they feel. In fact as I write this, I was interrupted and brought into a whole conversation that I had to politely exit. It will now take me a bit of time to get back into my flow, even though it wasn’t a “peak” flow. Regardless the show must go on, and so must you. Don’t wait for the right time. Peak states only come to those who are willing to do the work regardless.

3. Most of what you think you need to know, doesn’t matter

So many artists have this belief that they can’t start making music with what they know right now. Because of this fear of creating, they over prepare. They end up wasting 100’s of hours watching every tutorial outlining tips for every style of music & diving deep into music theory.

What they don’t realize is that most of this information will fall right back out of your head & never make it into your tool box. On top of that, they are getting so many opposing pieces of advice, that all this information causes more confusion than it does benefits.

As a rule, a new producer should be spending 80% of her time making music & only 20% (at most) spent learning new techniques. I recommend you take your own skills as far as you possibly can, and only then do you search out the 1 or 2 tutorials that will get you over that creative hump so you can reach the next level in your music making.

This is the only way you will retain what you have learned as well as the only way you will keep yourself focused on actually music making. Don’t get yourself caught up in the information trap for the wrong reasons.

4. Most of the tools you think you need, you don’t

Many producer’s new and old join groups & forums related to their musical style or DAW of choice. I believe it is smart to interact with likeminded people, but be warned. The time people are spending in these forums is time they probably should be making great music. This lack of focus on actually working on your music can become addicted as everyone in the group lets everyone else off the hook.

Then there are the “know it alls”. These are the people who are pissed off their amazing talents haven’t boosted them into the stratosphere of fame and glory. These people are better than you & want you to know it.

“oh you’re using that compressor? That thing sounds like dogshit! If you aren’t using xyz plugin or this piece of hardware, you might as well pack it in”

Pretty soon you are spending all of your songwriting time searching other forums discussing 100 different points of view on what compressor you need to have to be taken seriously by your peers.

Stop it. stop it. STOP IT!

Yes, there are some amazing plugin’s out there, but the truth is, if you learn how to use a certain tool inside & out, you can usually get great results. I personally use mostly internal plugins from my daw of choice (Ableton). I’ve heard many people tell me Logic effects are better, and although I wouldn’t disagree, I’ve found a way to get the job done quickly & efficiently with the tools I have and so far, the type of plugin’s I use has not effected getting my tracks signed & reaching the charts one single bit.

At the end of the day, the person that finishes the most songs wins every time. Focus on that.

5. Your habits count more than your knowledge

Once again, you need to stop thinking you need to know everything. I’ve personally gone that route. In the past, I was able to teach people how to use music software inside and out & they would take a few chosen gems & run with them while disregarding much of the information they didn’t need right now. Good on them, they were finishing music, and at the time, I wasn’t. Lesson learned.

If you want to be a successful songwriter or producer, you should first concentrate on your habits far before your knowledge. If you haven’t instilled the habits that will force you to work on music daily, your knowledge won’t matter.

Frankly it’s a bit stupid to keep adding tools to your already oversized toolbox if you are never going to sit your ass down and use them.

You will get FAR more benefit by creating the habit of sitting in from of your DAW of choice for 15 minutes a day, even if you don’t write a thing, than you will from force feeding your brain with more “knowledge”.

If you ever want to create a creative flow, it comes from clearing your mind, not stuffing it like that closet you don’t show any of your guests.

6. Everything you want comes through people

People are more important than knowledge. Look around at all of those highly successful people. Are they all there because they are geniuses? No way.

Everything you want (outside of your personal spiritual growth) is going to require relationships. You simply can’t stay locked out from the world, making great music & expect that to be enough. You are going to have to interact, communicate & share your value in trade for the value of others.

If you think you are above promoting yourself (in the most ethical way of course) and sharing you with the world, the world will never have the opportunity to appreciate who you are & what it is you do so well. Anyone who tells you otherwise, is lying to you.

7. You don’t have to be miserable to make good music

Man, if I hadn’t wasted all those years with the “artist” mentality, I might have gotten more done & enjoyed myself a whole lot more.

You don’t need to fabricate a difficult, dark & addicted lifestyle to be great. I’m not saying that getting out of your head every once in a while can’t be beneficial. It’s not popular to say this, but sometimes the drugs do work, at least for a little bit. Gladly, I did my share & got out of it before doing myself much permanent damage.

I can reflect on those experiences from a sober state of mind & say with complete conviction that I am 10 times more productive as a sober person (who has the occasional beer). Don’t follow your fellow musicians down the rabbit hole too far or you will fuck yourself, your creativity & your productivity.

Have experiences & make music, but always give your music top priority. The “lifestyle” is largely bullshit anyway. Don’t believe the hype.

8. Musicianship is optional

I’ve spoken out many times of my happiness in being a non-musician, or at least my happiness of not letting it get in the way of creating things I am proud of. So many great songwriters are not the best musicians & many of the best electronic artists don’t have a big musical background and many of those who do, found it a hinderance to creating outside the box at times.

A non-musician does not have a total lack of talent, it’s just coming from another angle. The man who I consider to be the greatest engineer & one of the most celebrated artists is Brian Eno. All the music theory in the world wouldn’t put me at his level of talent. He’s responsible for some of the best works of David Bowie, U2, David Bryne, Coldplay (I know, I know), James & even Devo, not to mention his incredible work with Roxy music.

For all of the incredible music he is responsible for, he still considers himself a crap musician. If you have a music background, wonderful, use it. If you don’t, also wonderful, create from a different angle. You will never know your capabilities until you embrace them.

9. Time is the only difference from you & those who are now successful

Your musical heroes are not really heroes, they are arrows pointing in the direction of your own potential. Do not allow the thought that “some have it and some don’t”, it’s simply not true. The truth is that some people work for it(unfortunately very few) tirelessly & consistently until they get it. Some of the best artists actually took longer to get there than you would expect.

The video below explains this concept better than my own words ever could, so please watch it and let it sink in.

If you want to know whether you’ve got it in you or not, look at your daily habits, not your skill level.

10. Everybody steals

So many people are so fucking paranoid that they just sit there staring at their computer screen like me wandering aimlessly in a supermarket trying to put a meal together. My god, if I couldn’t steal recipes from people much more gifted in cooking than me, I’d be in even more trouble.

The truth is, that all of the music you hear is inspired by another musician, artist, poet or some abstract thing someone recognized as having a beauty that others might not have seen from that perspective.

That idea you are afraid to borrow was almost certainly inspired by someone else, if not completely stolen. Picasso, John Lennon & Steve Jobs, all considered to be creative innovators all are famously quoted for nicking ideas pretty blatantly. You think Led Zeppelin were innovators? I did too & I still love them, but if you do some research, I’m sure you’ll be shocked.

Stealing ideas is how artists constantly fuel their own creativity. Letting go of the fear of being completely original will actually set you free & make you more creative, not less. Use samples, presets, loops, quotes, or even steal from your own past ideas. Nothing you can steal will be put back together quite like the source you got it from.

We are all human filters. This means that no matter what we borrow or steal, it still has to run through our unique set of parameters before it gets spit back out as our own art. Drop the fear & use everything around you when you create. It’s liberating.

Happy music making,

Jason

If you liked this article please make a comment below & feel free to share the lies YOU have been fed. If you want to take your Music Productions to the next level, I encourage you to take a look at my Producer’s Playground

this is so helpful! it makes a lot of sense too, and lines up with ideas of what is genius and inspiration from psychological studies. getting into the peak state requires getting started, not vice versa. and of course, judging the work too soon doesn’t lend itself to that state. many thanks for this valuable article.

So damn true!!! It’s like you’ve red my own revelations and wrote them down I’ve been through all these myself. Now I’m in the stage of escaping the fear of inspiring from the others work :).
I want to add or emphasize something from my own experience: Don’t let yourself caught too much in your current work, stop trying to be perfect, if it did not came to be the great hit you expected just let it go and move on. It might stop you from working on the next greatest song. It is a path you must walk, there are hills and there are valleys 😉

Thanks for these advices… I’m totally in this situation, I’ve too many music instruments and softwares regarding my low level of knowledge.
Years I’m thinking to begin but when I begin, it isn’t long, and when i come back, 50% of what I had learn is forgotten…
Reading all this make me think that I must to do it seriously, every day and continue…

Dude, rad article. So liberating. I’m an OK musician with a very basic understanding of Logic/Pro Tools etc. with pretty basic gear (m-box, alright guitars, ok mics, average midi etc.) but I pride myself on my song-writing. It’s so easy to get caught up in the technicalities of plug-ins, theory knowledge, having better gear, a better studio, better software etc. but in the end if I can write a song and record it I end up far happier than when I spend all my time searching for things I can’t afford, and watching youtube’s about things I barely understand. You’re 100% right that producing it’s self is where you will grow the most. Me and some friends took all our gear to a house and recorded some songs. Here’s one of them. A lot of people ragged on it because it’s not perfect, not mastered and pretty raw, but in the end I think the songs own depth and emotion out-weighs those things. Check it out. (ps. I also love brian eno). Thanks, Bear.

Great article, thanks for sharing! Totally understand and made those mistakes – still do… getting caught up in sounds and tones before writing a full song – i get in this loop and before you know it 4 hours have passed and I still only have a seed of an idea and a 8 track 8-bar loop to show for it !! Back to the drawing board

A terrific article! I may have missed this but one other pitfall that I have fallen into is either allowing criticism to affect me too much… or too little… depending on my emotional/mental state at the time. My advice, as a newbie, is truly consider the criticism (no matter how harsh) over a period of time… there’s usually (not always, of course) some tidbits of helpful truth in it.

Finishing a song/piece of music even if it’s bad, is more beneficial than writing a load of loops/verses/choruses.

Going against that! If a piece isn’t coming together, leave it. Move on create a new piece and come back to the old one at a later time.

Don’t be precious about your work. Say you spent 4 hours crafting a bass line, as the song has progressed all the other elements work well together, but now the bass line doesn’t fit. Don’t fall in to the rut of having to make the bass line work, pull it out keep it to use in something else and write a new one that does fit.

I agree about it being more important to actually be writing music instead of reading about how to write it. If you assume that for every 10 songs you write, only one is going to be good enough, that would mean that for an eight track album you would need to write 80 songs. As you progress and develop your skills you may have started with one out of ten being good, or even one out of fifty, but could end up with one out of three being excellent and the other two being OK. If you haven’t written all those bad songs however you won’t have cleared them out to make room for the good ones to surface.

On the point of habit and creativity. I created a pyramid type system this year as a personal development.
For the first three months write one song a month, for the next three months write two songs a month, the next three write three songs a month and for the last three months write four songs. By the end of the 12 months you will have not only written 30 songs but will have also developed the habit of writing almost a song a week. The main reason for this was as a way to give myself targets that were easy to achieve but also created a challenge and force me to think about time management.

oh dear, oh dear, what a confused point of view. A musician is one who makes music. A producer makes music, hence he’s a musician. Musicianship is the craft of a music maker. If a producer makes good music, he has got musicianship. Saying that musicianship is optional for a producer means that he does not have to make good music. Are we being advised to produce bad music? I guess not. Maybe Jason means that some musicians who have no production experience give poor advice in the studio. If they do, can they be considered to have musicianship? surely a god musician knows when he is out of his depth. On the other hand, if their advice is good (and constructive), why not take it on board?

I understand that many academic musicians claim the idea of musicianship for themselves and define songwriters, producers and others outside of the realm of musicians. To hear a producer accept that travesty of language is unfortunate.

Yes I agree – back yourself where you ARE at at any given time and stress less about where you’re NOT!
The old ‘one in the hand is worth two in the bush’ saying applies imo – i.e a finished song that is out there being heard and shared (even if only by a small number of people)is worth 100 tracks that are going through their 250th mix or waiting on that perfect snare reverb!
GO HARD AND JUST DO IT!

So shockingly true, that story of yours. So realistic. I understand that you must preserve the purity of the Flow as much as to fight for your rights, … to play and be heard. AND that you have to do it for a while….
Yes, time is the only thing between you and success. only how long do I still have?
anyway it was very interesting to read that excellent article. Thank you Pal !

While I think that sometimes better results for some work comes from letting it develop through time, so sometimes waiting (but working subconsciously)–I think this article is very much fundamentally true and really helpful. I have been learning and learning and learning but not creating recently, and part of that learning may help me expand the palette of possibility, but the other part is fed by anxiety/distractions relating to all the aspects you wrote so well about in such a pragmatic and clear way. Thank you! This is the right article and the right time for me. A truly great and inspiring, head out of sand/ass pulling straight talk of in the flesh, written, internet words. Totally synchronicity for me.

Mark. Great article. I have produced and remixed countless major artists over the last 2 decades. I tell people all the time. Stop thinking and just start laying down tracks. Sometimes the music is technically wrong but feels great. That’s what matters.
Steve “Mr. Mig” Migliore
Multiplatinum Producer/Remixerhttp://www.MaxxBeats.com

Good info. I am a strong believer that it requires a disciplined person to create music prolifically. Focus on making sure you have your life taken care of and those things will transfer into your music making. Clean your house, take care of your responsibilities because those things will hang over you when you try to sit down and make music. Learning to create good habits and routines in life will teach you how to have those things in music making as well.

Man! My dream is being an eletro DJ (D&B,Dubstep,Crossbreed) since ever. Music it’s just what makes me feel alive and feel like i can conquer the world. Thanks a lot for the tips, I’ve been working hard on this project and I hope someday acomplish it.

One point I’d add – it’s better to sound like a crap version of you than a good version of someone else.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that each of us needs to stay true to ourselves. Don’t waste your time trying to be Deadmau5 – the jobs already taken and his fans won’t be fooled. Instead, just make sounds that you want to hear, and not what you think other people want to hear. It might not sound as good as Deadmau5 to start with – but it will eventually. And then you will be a position where other people will go – I wish I sounded like him/her. Hopefully they won’t fall into the same trap you almost did. Then you will truly be contributing back into the musical gene pool. It will make you, and your fans, feel good.

Great article, agree with a lot but some I don’t at all. Not knowing how to play piano left me frustrated and I kept sounding the same. Getting into music theory and piano classes upgraded my my sound. I dicked around for 10 years in forums but never really understood what was being said. For me it took going to college and sitting through 4 levels of commercial music recording. Totally confident in my mixes now, but I’m also one to create constantly. If I’m not making a beat, I’m writing a song, if not that I’m recording a song and if that’s not happening I’m mixing and playing around with all my tools in my bundle. I don’t think taking the time to learn how to be a musician is a waste. As soon as I was taught chords and scales, and to play w both hands doing different things OMG was I inspired. I dunno that’s just me though I have my own studio and live in it so I’m constantly creating. Still lots of good stuff, it does take hundreds of songs and beats before you really find yourself. Took me a decade and now I can tap into my feelings and create for real. Thanks for this you can NEVER learn too much especially if you actively apply it to your workflow…

I agree completely. I sell my beats online, and I watched and listened to a lot of tutorials on how to do this, many of them were like you need to have a website, and you need to have a professional who has been doing this for years to master your beat. Well, this was all BS, because, I sell more beats than the producers around me, and they all have websites, simply because I utilized YouTube properly, there’s a lot of traffic there. To the point where all the producers around me with websites, ask if I can put up their instrumentals on my channel, so they can get faster sales. Another thing I have realized about producers who are constantly uploading ‘How To Sell Beats’ Tutorial videos on YouTube, have VERY mediocre beats. I haven’t found a single one who has AMAZING beats. So I remembered a saying my ‘day-job’ boss always says, ‘Those who can’t do teach’. So they do it for YouTube Traffic, because they’re not that good.

Watch and learn. Be good and kind and appreciate others.For someone to succeed in the music industry there’s a long line of people that need to believe in that person.If you’re going to succeed in this business, you learn pretty quick that being appreciative of other people’s time, skills and talent is the key to being successful. Being a good, kind, human being is paramount.